Beta Male

by Iain Hollingshead

  ‘And what would that be?’ asked Ed.

  ‘Money,’ I said.

  ‘Why?’ said Matt.

  ‘Because, my slow-witted friends, money liberates. And if you’re going to be trapped by marriage anyway, you might as well be trapped in the most liberated fashion. There are plenty of women now who have money, who earn it, who want to earn more of it. You guys have sat here all afternoon and prattled away about women running the world. Well, fine, they’re welcome to the world. They’re welcome to the world of work, at least. It’s rubbish. But let’s play them at their own game. As modern men, let’s play the game that they have been playing against us for centuries. Let’s find three girls who are ambitious, successful and, above all, very, very rich. And then let’s marry them and become house-husbands. Just think – ’

  ‘We’ll never have to do another day’s work in our lives,’ interrupted Matt, excitedly.

  ‘Exactly! And I can act in my spare time without worrying about money.’

  ‘We’ll live on the same street.’

  ‘We’ll go to the pub during the day.’

  ‘We won’t have to lose touch with our friends.’

  ‘I’ll never have to look for a job I don’t want.’

  ‘I’ll actually get to know my own kids.’

  ‘I’ll coach my son to play football for England.’

  ‘All our friends will be jealous.’

  Ed was just about to tell us what he thought of our scheme when a key turned in the front door and Alan walked in, as wet and as shaken as Ed had been four hours previously.

  It was me who leapt forward first. ‘Alan. What is it? What’s happened?’

  ‘Jess,’ he said. ‘It’s Jess. We’re getting married, I think.’

  His face wasn’t exactly the picture of a happy groom-to-be.

  ‘What do you mean, “you think”?’

  Alan surveyed the room of his drunk, oldest friends. ‘Jess got down on one knee in front of my boss and asked me,’ he said, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a hideously tacky piece of jewellery which we later discovered was called a ‘male engagement ring’. ‘It was the most emasculating moment of my whole bloody life.’

  Chapter Five

  For some reason you never really feel what you’re supposed to when the big events in life happen. When my dad told me that my much-loved grandfather had died, my first thought was, Will my parents get the nice table in the drawing room or will it go down my aunt’s side of the family? When I turned over my A-level economics paper, all I could think about was how easily I could screw up the rest of my life by writing ‘Bollocks! Bollocks! Bollocks!’ all over my essay. And when Jess got down on one knee and proposed outside the front door of my accountancy office, my knee-jerk reaction was that her cleavage looked very nice in that red top and that, whatever my answer, it might be the last time I ever saw her on her knees in front of me.

  It was 6.30pm on a blustery Thursday in August in Embankment in central London. The sun was beginning to lose its warmth as storm clouds moved in from the south. Tourists ambled towards musicals in the West End. Commuters jostled to get to the Tube, or into the wine bars. Opposite my office a tramp was attempting to play a harmonica, sell the Big Issue and control his randy dog, all at the same time. A traffic helicopter buzzed overheard, competing with a constipated siren attempting to force its way through the rush-hour traffic on the Strand. But it was as if all this came to a stop. It was as if all this mass of machinery and humanity knew that something dreadful and embarrassing was about to take place. It was as if they were only there as extras in Jess’s big scene, called upon to bear witness as she approached with a quiet, determined smile on her face and a box in her hands. As she sank to her knees and thrust it towards me, my brain pushed my initial, inappropriate thoughts to one side and my mouth began to form a silent, strangulated, prolonged, ‘No’.

  It was at that moment that I heard my boss behind me.

  ‘Well, screw me sideways, Alan Muir, if this isn’t what I think it is,’ she bellowed. Amanda is in her mid-forties, a fading – if not faded – beauty, divorced, bitter, nosy, interfering, clever, terrifying, psychotic and always asking people to ‘screw her sideways’ or ‘fuck her backwards’ as a throwaway turn of phrase. Personally, I find the constant swearing a little offensive. The bellow continued: ‘Are you really about to become Mr Jessica Gallagher in front of my very eyes?’

  Inside an office Amanda’s voice can break windows. Outside, well, the helicopter and the police car had competition. A little crowd gathered.

  To her credit, Jess smiled her determined little smile and resolved to see it through. ‘Alan Michael Muir,’ she said, ‘will you do me the honour of becoming my husband?’

  I have never heard of any trusted authority – not a men’s magazine, Nick Hornby, Top Gear, The SAS Survival Handbook – which tells you what to do in this sort of situation. I was on my own. Or at least, I wished I were on my own.

  ‘Grow a pair of fucking balls, Alan, and say yes,’ bellowed Amanda, evidently enjoying herself.

  I wanted to say yes, of course. I looked down at my beautiful girlfriend, whom I certainly loved and probably wanted to marry, and thought just how much I wanted to say yes and make her happy. I looked around at the eager faces of the passers-by and thought how nice it would be to say yes and give them a pleasant vignette to share and remember in an otherwise forgettable Thursday. And I sensed Amanda behind me and thought how satisfying it would be to say yes and stop her constant, and somewhat crude, jibes in the office about ‘popping the bloody question before my sperm count got any lower and Jessica Gallagher ended up barren’.

  I really wanted to say yes. But more than that, I really wanted Jess to be answering yes to a question I had formulated, pondered and popped. That was the correct way to go about it.

  So, instead of doing the right thing, swallowing my pride and nodding a straightforward affirmative, I attempted a clumsy compromise and fell to my knees in front of Jess, so that we looked like two amputees congratulating each other at the finish line of the five-metre Paralympic shuffle, and asked, in a meek, alien voice which sounded higher than hers, and certainly higher than Amanda’s, ‘Jessica Sarah, will you do me the honour of becoming my wife?’

  It was meant to be romantic. Amanda guffawed, partly because my own knee-lunge had landed me in a muddy patch on the pavement. Someone in the crowd muttered audibly that Jess had asked first and therefore deserved an answer. Another siren made its way down the Strand.

  Jess’s face fell and I knew I’d done the wrong thing. ‘Do you have a ring?’ she asked, her jaw set a little more determinedly than before.

  ‘Can’t we go somewhere else to discuss this?’

  ‘No,’ said the crowd. Jess shook her head, agreeing with them, disagreeing with me.

  ‘Well, as a matter of fact, I do have a ring.’ I felt around in my back pocket and closed my thumb and forefinger around my car keyring. That would not do. ‘But I’ve had it commissioned especially and it’s not ready yet.’

  Jess’s stern face turned into a full-blown grin. With perfect timing, and a deft flick that made it look as though she had been practising, she opened the box with her thumb and proffered something I now know is called a male engagement ring. It was hideous: the gold too yellow; the pattern too ornate. Had she actually spent a barrister’s monthly salary on this? It winked at me, mockingly, as it caught the light.

  ‘Then, my lovely Alan, I think it only right that I should ask you if you would like to be my husband.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, simply, for there was nothing else left to say. She had won.

  The crowd clapped; a few tourists even whooped. Amanda snorted louder than all of them put together – a strange combination of disgust, contempt and jealousy – and walked towards the Tube. It started to rain.

  I hauled Jess to her feet and took her away from this circus for a celebratory dinner on St Martin’s Lane, at a restaurant I’d often walked pas
t and admired but never actually plucked up the courage to enter. Once inside, however, the illusion instantly evaporated. The maître d’ poured more scorn into his welcoming ‘Sir’ than Amanda manages in an entire offensive outburst. The disappointing food looked as if it had been priced by taking a sensible figure and adding a zero. We were seated, perhaps deliberately due to my muddy trouser leg, between the toilets and the kitchen, so that the swing door to the toilets caught Jess’s chair leg every time it opened and the swing door to the kitchen caught me in the face. To add major insult to minor injury, the wine waiter approached our table, took one look at the ring I hadn’t yet had the heart to remove from my finger and appeared to hesitate momentarily over whom to give the wine menu to.

  ‘I’ll choose the wine,’ I said quickly.

  ‘Of course, sir,’ he said with a smile that made me want to stab him with his corkscrew. ‘And so you shall.’

  However hard I tried to remain cheerful, there was an atmosphere throughout dinner.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ asked Jess, repeatedly.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, a little more gruffly each time, until the main thing that was wrong was that she kept on asking me what was wrong. Nothing was wrong, really, if I was rational and honest. I loved the girl. I wanted to marry her, as you know. Her sweet and dramatic gesture was… well, sweet and dramatic. But I’m not sure that I was capable of being rational and honest at that moment. As far as I was concerned, everything was wrong. The restaurant, the awkward bit of over-decorated metal on my finger, the fact that Amanda had seen everything. How would I survive in the office now? Amanda made life difficult for all her colleagues, but she seemed to single me out for particular abuse. She took far too much interest in my personal life for comfort. She was offensive about nearly all aspects of it. Perhaps it was because I didn’t answer back. Perhaps it was because I was number two in her team and therefore the most immediate threat. Or it might even have been because I was one of the few people in the office who hadn’t slept with her, despite a couple of thinly veiled advances. Amanda, it was widely thought, used sex to control people, but the truth was that no one really knew what motivated her. She could be pleasant one moment and horrendous the next. Office gossip put it down to a bad divorce that had left her with a lifelong mission to take her revenge on men. Yet she could be equally horrible to her female colleagues, ferreting around for any sign of weakness she could use to gain an advantage. Sometimes I think she just behaved as she did to amuse herself. And what fun she was going to have now with this latest bit of ammunition. Hell, she had called me Mr Jessica Gallagher. Is that what I was going to become? I didn’t want to be Mr Jessica Gallagher. What was wrong with being called Mr Alan Muir?

  Then I started thinking about my parents and what they’d say. Actually, I already knew what my mum would say, but my dad had always told me that Jess was a keeper, that I should ask her before it was too late. Yet even he would laugh if I told him how it had come about, and no son wants to be laughed at by his father.

  Oh, fuck. What if Jess was so right-on that she’d already asked him for permission to marry his son?

  Then there was Sam. His best-man’s speech would be bad enough as it was, but if he had this extra bit of material…

  Well, none of it bore thinking about.

  I was so worked up by the time the bill arrived, I hadn’t realised I’d been on autopilot for the last two courses. When I’m angry, or distracted, I go quiet. Jess, of course, had noticed my pat responses to her increasingly enthusiastic monologues on mortgages and engagement parties and bathroom decorations, and eventually snapped at me again.

  ‘Come on, Alan, tell me what’s wrong.’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You don’t really mind that I asked you, do you? I thought you’d find it amusing. It’s not as if we haven’t talked about getting married before – ’

  The waiter, who had been hovering indiscreetly, eavesdropping on my misery, chose this moment to place the bill down on the table in front of us.

  ‘I’ll get it,’ said Jess. ‘My treat.’

  ‘No, you bloody well won’t,’ I said, more loudly than I had intended. I gripped the table – I was on my feet and hadn’t even realised I’d stood up – lowered my voice and spoke nonsensically at the confusing girl I loved: ‘I have gone out to work today. I have hunted and I have gathered. Let me pay.’

  Jess smiled gently, in a way that melted and enraged me simultaneously. ‘Okay, Alan. As you like.’

  But it hadn’t been as I liked. Not one little bit. And although I knew I was man enough not to mind, although I knew I shouldn’t have cared about the small details in the light of the bigger picture, I did care, deeply and fundamentally. And so when Jess asked if I was coming back to hers, or she to mine, I pretended that I was working on a big accounting deal and returned to the office, where I went to the gym for the first time in ten years, running like a madman on the treadmill until I collapsed.

  Then I got a cab home so I could speak to Sam. In times like these, you have to rely on someone who will really understand.

  Chapter Six

  ‘You understand, don’t you, Sam?’ implored Alan after he’d finished telling us a completely incomprehensible, but highly entertaining, story about Jess proposing to him in a public place in front of Amanda.

  ‘Of course,’ I said, biting a beery lip and trying not to catch anyone else’s eye. It had been a long afternoon and evening. ‘It happens to all of us every day.’

  ‘I understand that you’ll never be able to show your face in public again,’ sniggered Matt.

  ‘I think it was very understanding of you to say “yes”,’ attempted Ed, before losing it and laughing as well. ‘You’re a twenty-first-century emasculated man, through and through.’

  ‘Oh shut up, you pricks,’ said Alan, still sweaty from the mini-marathon he’d run in the office. ‘I’m not asking you to understand what happened, just how I feel about it.’

  ‘Now, that much I do get,’ said Ed, looking suddenly very dejected again. ‘It’s never easy when someone you love makes a decision without you.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Ed explained about Tara while Alan looked relieved to have something else to think about. After a minute or so the two of them had a little man-hug, unlucky and unsure in love respectively.

  ‘What a pair of losers, eh?’ snorted Matt, handing me another beer.

  Neither Ed nor Alan felt the need to answer that.

  ‘Still,’ I said. ‘At least some of us have got a solution for all this, haven’t we, guys?’

  ‘Speak for yourself,’ said Ed.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s a shit idea,’ said Ed. ‘It will never work. And even if it did, it would be demeaning to us as men.’

  Ed explained my house-husband masterplan to Alan, whereupon he, too, declared that it was a ridiculous idea. ‘If that’s the alternative to swallowing my pride and saying “yes” to Jess’s proposal, then I know which one I’d rather choose,’ said Alan.

  ‘We’re not asking you to choose, you silly tit,’ said Matt. ‘You’re one of the lucky ones – one of a very small, very lucky minority. Not only are you too dull, predictable and, probably, busy to look elsewhere, you also happen to have found someone you might actually want to spend the rest of your life with. Hell, I’d choose to marry Jess. Or at least, if I were as dull, predictable and busy as you, I’d choose to marry Jess.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Alan.

  ‘You’re welcome. And you’re welcome to Jess. She’s not entirely ugly, she cooks quite well, she’s bright enough but not too bright, her mother has aged fairly well, the rest of us can stand her, you seem to rub along okay without wanting to murder one another, at least in public, and she looks like she’s better in bed than the last girl you went out with almost a decade ago.’

  ‘Really, you’re too kind.’

  Actually, Matt really was too kind. There was no way any of us would want to marry J
ess. Yeuch.

  ‘All I’m saying, Alan,’ continued Matt, ‘is that you should have a little sympathy for the rest of us while you go about it. Not all of us are as dull and predictable as you.’

  ‘Not all of us are as lucky as you,’ chimed in Ed, toadyingly. Maybe he did actually like Jess, that great, big, friend-stealing whale of a barrister.

  ‘And because we now have plenty of time on our hands, we can afford to be unpredictable and interesting,’ said Matt.

  ‘Well, we can’t really afford to,’ I said. ‘Then again, we can’t really afford not to. Imagine if we had time on our hands and we were also predictable and dull. Then we’d be losers twice over.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Matt. ‘This house-husband scheme is going to be our little hobby to pass the time.’

  ‘Your little hobby,’ said Ed.

  ‘Your loss,’ said Matt.

  ‘Actually, it’s really Alan’s loss,’ I said. ‘He’s going to look pretty stupid when Matt and I both manage to ask a girl to marry us before he does.’

  Matt laughed. ‘Yeah, let’s have a bet,’ he said. Matt loved his bets. The who-can-dance-with-everyone-first bet at Lisa’s wedding aside, he usually won them.

  ‘As if you guys could hold down a relationship for more than six months,’ said Alan. ‘I’d certainly bet against that. Anyway, Sam, I thought you hated the idea of marriage.’

  ‘Oh, I do,’ I replied. ‘It’s the most trapping, outdated societal more still in existence. Have I told you my theory?’

  ‘Please,’ groaned Ed. ‘Not another one.’

  ‘My theory,’ I continued, ‘is that, whenever you get suicidally bored of one stage of life, you move unquestioningly on to the next. You can’t stand school so you go to university. You get bored with university so you get a job. Your job drives you mad so you get a girlfriend. You run out of things to say to your girlfriend so you marry her. You hate your marriage so you have children to take your mind off it. That doesn’t work so you get divorced. Being divorced is lonely so you get married and start all over again. And then you die.’ I shrugged. ‘I suppose it’s a progression of sorts. Anyway, Alan, as I’ve just been explaining to the others, it seems to be a fairly inevitable progression. And ultimately, probably better than the lonely alternatives. So what I really want to do is to show you just how easy it all is. You think you’ve found “the one” with Jess, don’t you? But you can make anyone think they’re the one. You can make anyone fall in love with you, if you really try. Just look at girls our age. They hit thirty, they panic and they can’t wait to get married. Even the rich, supposedly liberated ones. Actually, especially the rich, liberated ones – they don’t have time to meet anyone else. They’re sizing you up as suitable father material to their as yet unborn children as soon as you open your mouth. So I tell you: when this scheme all works out – and work out, it will – Matt and I are going to be laughing almost as much as you guys are going to be kicking yourselves for not thinking of it earlier. Just you wait and see: finding an acceptable Mrs Sam Hunt is going to be a walk in the park.’